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• Before we even had to be in any formal institution of learning, our parents taught us to articulate and write our names.
• Our names represent who we are, human beings attach names that are meaningful to birthed progenies because names are supposed to designate us in the world.
• Some people get baptized with names such as “beauty”, “lovely”, or “king”.
• As students, we are told to always write our names on our papers, projects, or any output for that matter.
• Our names signify us, a name is not a person itself, it is only a signifier.
• The self is thought to be something else than the name, it is something that a person perennially molds, shapes, and develops.
• Everyone is tasked to discover one’s self.
• Philosophy, derived from the Greek word “philosophia”, means “love of wisdom”.
• Philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other.
• As an academic discipline philosophy is much the same, those who study philosophy are perpetually engaged in asking, answering, and arguing for their answers to life’s most basic questions.
• Philosophy is a discipline comprising logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
• The history of philosophy is replete with men and women who inquired into the fundamental nature of self.
• The Greeks were the ones who seriously questioned myths and moved away from them in attempting to understand reality and respond to questions of curiosity including the question of the self.
• The different perspective and views on the self can be best seen and understood by revisiting its prime movers and identify the most important conjectures made by philosophers from ancient times to the contemporary period.
• David Hume asserts that the "self" is a "bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity".
• John Locke suggests that a person should not be used as a tool, instrument, or device to accomplish another’s private ends.
• Gilbert Ryle believes that the "self" is not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply the convenient name that people use to refer to all the behaviours that people make.
• Immanuel Kant asserts that all men are persons gifted with the basic rights and should treat each other as equals.
• Gilbert Ryle solves the mind-body dichotomy by denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self.
• Paul Churchland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism, the view that because the mind and brain are identical, we should eliminate the folk-psychological language from our vocabulary and replace it with a new scientific/neurophysiological language.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty asserts that the mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another.
• Paul Churchland is a proponent of eliminative materialism, the view that because the mind and brain are identical, we should eliminate the folk-psychological language from our vocabulary and replace it with a new scientific/neurophysiological language.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a phenomenologist who asserts that the mind-body bifurcation that has been going on for a long time is a futile endeavor and an invalid problem.
• Merleau-Ponty dismisses the Cartesian Dualism that has spelled so much devastation in the history of man.
• For Merleau-Ponty, the Cartesian problem is nothing else but plain misunderstanding.
• The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and experience are all one according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
• Socrates, a Greek philosopher, is principally concerned with man and considers man from the point of view of his inner life.
• The core of Socratic ethics is the concept of virtue and knowledge, virtue is the deepest and most basic propensity of man.
• Knowing one’s own virtue is necessary and can be learned, since virtue is innate in the mind and self-knowledge is the source of all wisdom, an individual may gain possession of oneself and be one’s own master through knowledge.
• According to Plato, man was omniscient or all-knowing before he came to be born into this world, with his separation from the paradise of truth and knowledge and his long exile on earth, he forgot most of the knowledge he had.
• By constant remembering through contemplation and doing good, man can regain his former perfections.
• Man who is now an exile on earth has a guiding star, a model, or a divine exemplar which he must follow to reach and attain his destiny.
• In the view of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, man is a dual nature of body and soul, with the soul forging a life of virtue and the body yearning for immortality.
• Plato, Socrates’ student, emphasized that man is a dual nature of body and soul and that there are three components of the soul: the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul.
• Justice in the human person can only be attained if three parts of the soul are working harmoniously with one another, according to Plato.
• The rational soul, forged by reason and intellect, has to govern the affairs of the human person, the spirited part which is in charge of emotions, and the appetitive soul in charge of base desires like eating, sleeping, and having sex are controlled as well.
• The body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with God, according to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
• The goal of every human person is to attain this communion and bliss with the Divine by living his life on earth in virtue, according to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
• Thomas Aquinas, the most eminent thirteenth century scholar and stalwart of the medieval philosophy, appended something to this Christian view, stating that man is composed of two parts; matter and form.
• Matter, or hyle in Greek, refers to the “common stuff that makes up everything in the universe”, man’s body is part of this matter.